"It was very difficult. People don’t really know about it because I’ve always been pretty vague, but I’ve alluded to it in certain songs," Carey explained. "'Close My Eyes' from Butterfly talks about it: 'I was a wayward child with the weight of the world that I held deep inside / Life was a winding road, and I learned many things little ones shouldn’t know.' A lot of intense stuff happened to me when I was a kid, that people who grew up with money or with families that weren’t fully dysfunctional will never quite understand."

The Caution singer also unpacked one of her new songs, "8th Grade," and why that time in childhood was "one of the lowest points of my life."

"That’s not a happy song," she shared. "The year before, I had dyed my hair orange by mistake. I shaved my eyebrows. I had no clothes. Somebody once said in the hallway to me at school, 'Oh, she got three shirts in rotation.' It was mortifying."

"My mom chose to live in predominantly white neighborhoods, where people had more money than us, and I didn’t fit in there," she continued. "Or in an all black neighborhood when my parents were together; as a mixed couple, they had problems there. So there was not one safe place. But eighth grade was also me being like, 'Oh, my gosh, I like this kid, and he doesn’t like me. That’s the end of the world!' You know that feeling. When we were writing that song, I just had this melancholy thing in me, and it still felt young. I just know what I felt like."